AI Is a Tool. And It's Clearly a Useful One.

Linus Torvalds, responding to a discussion about the use of LLMs in Linux kernel maintenance:

I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.

What I find interesting is hearing this from engineers who have been around for decades. While cleaning up some of my old content, I was also catching up on Patrick Wyatt’s blog. In Finding Bugs with an Automated AI Test Agent, he wrote:

Every day I’m surprised by how capable AI agents are becoming. Today’s surprise was how the agent can build its own test-harness to find bugs.

Different context, same observation: AI agents are becoming capable enough that their usefulness is no longer theoretical.

And, in the usual Linus style, this made me chuckle:

And no, AI isn’t perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.

Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.